The former vice president dropped in on an Aspen Institute media forum in Colorado titled “Networks an Citizenship” on Thursday and railed against corporate evildoers who
put profit above society. [In a related story, Al Gore could become the first 'carbon billionaire']

Gore referenced the book “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, which tells of how petroleum, steel, autos, utilities and others enlisted lobbyists to cloud the climate debate.

Gore recalled how not long ago tobacco giants “succeeded in delaying the implementation of the surgeon general’s report for 40 years – 40 years! In every one of those 40 years the average number of Americans killed by cigarettes each year exceeded the total number of Americans killed in all of World War II: 450,000 per year. My sister was one of them. … It was evil, evil, evil.”

[Same old tired tobacco argument that has nothing to do with climate change. But, since he brought it up, Gore fails to mentionhe grew up on a tobacco farm, worked on it, and continued to accept checks from that farm for years after his sister died. In 1988, while running for president, he defended tobacco farmers while campaigning in Southern tobacco states (and made the quote: 'I've raised tobacco ... I've shredded it, spiked it,... and sold it.') He accepted contributions from tobacco companies as late as 1990. Gore claimed that "emotional numbness" led him to defend and profit from the tobacco industry. "Sometimes, you never fully face up to things that you ought to face up to."]

The model of media manipulation used then, Gore said, “was transported whole cloth into the climate debate. And some of the exact same people — I can go down a list of their names — are involved in this. [Gore fails to mention a single name] And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists [again no evidence provided; Gore himself is the poster-child pseudo-scientist and profiteer] to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat . It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.” Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!” Gore exclaimed.

[Notes to Al regarding his pseudo-scientific 'Bullshit!': 1) Nothing in the universe can 'trap heat' radiation, other than a black hole2) Your buddies Hansen and Mann claim the Little Ice Age was a result of volcanic eruptions, and have also claimed a "delayed" effect of the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption resulted in a recent lack of warming3) Solar activity has been shown in many peer-reviewed papers to have multiple direct and secondary amplified effects upon climate4) Even your fellow warmists admit the globe has not warmed since 1998]

“When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again,” he continued. “There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea! And yet our ability to actually come to a shared reality that emphasizes the best evidence. It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it.” Gore lamented the diminished role that reason and fact-based analysis play in modern U.S. politics.

“Unnoticed in Washington and New York as the debt-ceiling debate was going on, the ratio of television advertisements was nine to one on the ‘Don’t-lift-the-debt-ceiling debate. Spending is the problem.’ And now we’re going to tip the country back into recession. It’s absolutely insane,” Gore said.

“Mark my words on this: we became the greatest country on earth because we made better decisions than any other nation,” he continued. “And we made better decisions because we used shared consciousness, shared reality, rule of reason, best evidence, democratic discourse, free debate to figure out what’s more likely than not to be the best decision here. It didn’t always work, but it worked a hell of a lot better. Since we adopted this new system we are making catastrophic decisions that have massive consequences. The Iraq invasion. What just happened with macro-economic policy. It really is extremely difficult.”

7 comments:

The debate coward sure make himself look like a low level moron.Forgets that the internet has long memories of his utter baloney of the past.

The simple fact is that for a man who has a lot of experience debating people.He avoids them like the plague on global warming topics.

This is a man who does not really have confidence in what he believes.He will not as one of the warmist gods,get out of one of his energy hogging mansions and debate those terrible people he rudely calls "deniers".

This revealing behavior should have made some of the warmist lemmings wonder why he is so afraid to debate.